Juvenile Court Slows Plan To Overhaul

October 13, 1994|By Susan Kuczka, Tribune Staff Writer.

An ambitious plan to overhaul the way child abuse and neglect cases are assigned in Cook County Juvenile Court has been significantly scaled back because of problems in transferring 35,000 pending cases to new courtrooms, court officials said Wednesday.

The revised plan calls for only new cases, and old cases where decisions about abused and neglected children's futures already have been largely determined, to be placed on the "key-date" system. The system originally was designed to create better appearance rates at Juvenile Court hearings by workers for the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services.

Under the original proposal, all cases would have been placed on the key-date system, which was patterned after the court-assignment system already in place at Traffic Court. There, police are routinely assigned to specific courtrooms on specific days.

But it became evident shortly after officials tried to start the new system at Juvenile Court last month that transferring all of the 35,000 abuse and neglect cases would be a daunting task.

"The judges originally thought it would not be too difficult and it would be worthwhile to try to do it as soon as possible, but because of the number of cases affected, which is something we could not know ahead of time, it became difficult for everybody," said Juvenile Court Chief Judge Sophia Hall.

When the plan was conceived about two years ago, there were about 22,000 abuse and neglect cases pending in Juvenile Court. But since then, a record number of complaints to the state's child-welfare agency has flooded DCFS and the court system, officials said.

The court caseload has grown so large, in fact, that plans currently are under way to add six new judges to the abuse and neglect courtrooms, bringing the total to 20 by early next year, Hall said.

Cook County Public Guardian Patrick Murphy, who originally opposed the key-date system, said Wednesday that he was relieved court officials decided to implement the plan at a slower pace.

"If we had to move these cases around, it would have been a disaster unprecedented in the court system," said Murphy, whose office represents children in Juvenile Court. "Case files would be lost, kids would be lost, and kids would be sent home who shouldn't be sent home. All the institutional memory would have been lost."